As previously indicated, I am interpreting the main body of Mansfield Park’s plot as happening in 1796-1797. However, the age indicators for most of the characters in this essay are very vague. Tom Bertram is apparently 25 during the main body of the plot, and I have randomly assumed that Henry Crawford is around that age, and that his sister Mary Crawford and their acquaintance John Yates are rather younger. 

-Mrs. Grant, the wife of the clergyman who succeeds Mr. Norris, is the half-sister of Mary and Henry Crawford. Her mother was widowed, and remarried to Mr. Crawford of Everingham, with whom she had the two children mentioned above. Assuming Henry to be around 25 at the time of the main plot of the novel, his parents married around 1770-1771. 

–Mr. Crawford seems to have predeceased his wife, and the wife’s death followed not long after her eldest daughter’s marriage to Mr. Grant, which means Mrs. Grant was probably 18-20 years old at that point. It was at this time that Henry and Mary went to live with Admiral Crawford (Mr. Crawford’s younger brother) and the Admiral’s wife. We don’t know the exact age of the Crawford siblings at this point in their history. It seems clear that they were teenagers at most, and possibly younger, given the strong impact of Admiral Crawford and Mrs. Admiral Crawford on the personalities of the younger Crawford generation. From the way Mrs. Grant turned out, and the residual good instincts that the Crawford siblings occasionally show, I think their mother and both her husbands were fairly decent people, but we don’t know much more about them than that, only that the Crawford estate (Everingham) is in Norfolk.  

–Assuming Mrs. Grant is ten years older than Henry, and married at age eighteen, Henry would have been 8-9 years old when he went to live with the Admiral, and Mary rather younger. By implication, the mother of the siblings married Mrs. Grant’s father, no later than 1760-1761, and possibly earlier. In other words, Mrs. Grant’s parents might have been near contemporaries of the elder Brandons, from Sense and Sensibility. 

-Admiral Crawford is apparently well-connected within his profession, but conducts his private life in a disreputable fashion. He apparently kept a mistress fairly openly during his wife’s lifetime and moved her into his house a few months after the wife’s death, at which point his niece Mary Crawford had to move out. The Admiral’s protégé, Henry Crawford, has charming manners, is well-educated with good taste in literature and landscaping, and doesn’t seem to live beyond his means or go around impregnating teenaged girls at the seaside. So, basically, the Admiral did a better job of raising Henry Crawford than whoever raised John Willoughby, which may be the definition of damning with faint praise. We may, I think, safely imagine the Admiral as an older version of Henry in terms of taste and social behavior, but with a different cause for his restlessness. The Admiral had his career in the Navy to occupy him when he was Henry’s age, and probably never entirely got over being kicked upstairs and forced to serve the navy on land. Henry has never found anything similar to occupy him.

–It’s possible Mrs. Admiral Crawford had some kind of revenge-affair but was discreet about it. Mary seems more put out by the publicity surrounding Maria Rushworth’s affair with her brother, than by the whole adultery thing. To me, this makes more sense if she’s known and respected a married woman who did something similar but managed to keep it out of the newspapers. Could it be one of her London friends instead? Maybe, but she doesn’t seem to respect them the way she respects her late aunt. 

–Jane Austen was rather an admirer of the author Maria Edgworth and her novel Belinda, published about ten years before Mansfield Park. In Belinda the novel, Belinda the heroine has a close friend named Lady Delacour: a witty, volatile London sophisticate trapped in a bad marriage. Her husband is not a close match for the Admiral, but ever since reading Belinda, I’ve visualized Lady Delacour as a somewhat younger version of Mrs. Admiral Crawford. 

–Admiral and Mrs. Admiral Crawford most likely seemed pretty appealing back when they were at the courtship stage. He was probably a dashing, cultured, very successful Captain in the Navy; she an equally dashing and cultured debutante, rather younger than then-Captain Crawford. We don’t know when this courtship happened, although the Admiral is younger than his brother,(1) so possibly married later (i.e. after 1770-1771). They perhaps married impulsively, just before he went to sea again. It’s possible that during his time at sea she found out that he’d had a sidepiece all through his courtship of her, and their relationship went downhill from there. It’s also possible that they had a comparatively good relationship until the wife fell ill, and the affair with the mistress started then. Basically, choose your poison, based on the story you want to tell.

-Mr. John Yates is the younger son of a lord, described as have easy, friendly manners but also being idle and expensive. He has acquaintances at Weymouth and Cornwall. He’s a relatively new acquaintance of Tom Bertram’s, so not someone he knew at university. After Julia Bertram’s hasty marriage, Sir Thomas finds Mr. Yates’s debts to be less than he expected. This implies that Yates is perhaps not much of a gambling man(2) or the kind to have kept expensive mistresses. His main obsession is the TheaTUH, and probably that is where his money goes. He sounds like the type to be rather a dandy than otherwise, so probably his tailor, hatmaker, etc are also getting rather a large share of his income. He’s apparently never met anyone who wasn’t okay with theatricals, so probably the rest of his family share his enthusiasm. His older brother was perhaps rather like a wealthier version of Tom Bertram, given the speed with which Yates attaches himself to the elder Bertram son. Yates seems to have been well-brought-up, in the sense that he tries to be polite and is never sleazy or intentionally hurtful that we can see.

–All we can say for certain is that his parents were probably pleasant, indulgent people with tastes and manners similar to their son’s, and they don’t seem to have made any fuss about the elopement, or none worth noticing. Assuming the only sibling older than John is the unknown brother, and that the latter is around Tom and Henry’s age, the elder Yateses might have married around 1770-1771.

–As for Yates himself: just a shallow, good-natured, self-centered kind of guy, perhaps easily led in most things, since Julia seems to take the initiative in their elopement. There are a lot of worse people than that, even in Jane Austen’s world. I hope John and Julia Yates had a fun, comfortable existence with many amateur theatricals at their home…but not Lovers’ Vows. 

(1) First son gets the estate, younger sons go into military or clergy, was how these things were generally managed.

(2) Based on Tom Bertram’s interest in horseracing and hunting, I think gambling and expensive horseflesh is where Tom’s money goes.